By Kevin Moran, Operations Coordinator
I first came to find out about PCCC quite by accident. The Rochelle Trailhead is the nearest hiking trail to our Windsor home which my family first began to explore in 2022. We quickly fell in love with the extraordinary Prairie Creek Preserve. One day, around dusk, we wandered down a trail that we hadn’t yet taken, and before long we found ourselves in the heart of this very unusual cemetery. We soon found that this was a facility for conservation burial, and that we could get involved as volunteers, digging graves and helping out with burials. We immediately signed up, and while we were thrilled about the work, the community has proven invigorating and enduring.
Volunteering at Prairie Creek has many benefits. The connection you feel with the land while wandering its many trails, planting native species for planting days, or wielding the pick and spade, is unrivaled. The fascination you are met with when you can slip into casual conversation that you are, among many other things, a gravedigger, provides inexhaustible amusement. And you can pretty safely cancel that gym membership, as cemetery work has all you need by way of physical exertion. But foremost, the camaraderie of meeting your friends out in the woods or meadow, getting your hands in the earth together, and providing an indispensable service for ecologically-sound death care, is fulfilling beyond any labor I had experienced prior to my time here.
2025-26 has been a challenging period for a lot of people. For me, and for many others, getting to come together with my cemetery community, week in, week out, sharing our thoughts and our emotions in troubled times has been an incredible bulwark of emotional support. It can be easy to feel alienated in the many challenges that face us today, but the connectivity we weave every day through our mutual love of conservation burial can inspire a very real and grounded sense that we are not alone in our struggles, that we are in it together.
The volunteers of PCCC are a truly magical bunch. This land, and this work, attracts a fairly diverse array of individuals, who despite our varying backgrounds, our divergent opinions and experiences, are united in one important respect: we are gravediggers; we are conservation cemeterians.
